Welcome to the new digs… this is the place to hear about all the latest news & information (especially new features!) for Ooga-Mooga.

Previously, announcements about changes to Ooga-Mooga were posted on Tiki Central, and occasionally on Humu Kon Tiki or MySpace, and I’ve tried to help new features catch your eye on Ooga-Mooga by highlighting them in the sidebars. All in all, it was a bit of a higgledy-piggledy, and the news wasn’t reaching all of Ooga-Mooga’s users. This should work a lot better. I’ll still post some announcements on Tiki Central, but this is going to be the best place to hear the latest news.

If you’d like to subscribe to this blog, you can do so via email using the handy form in the upper-right — you’ll receive any updates to this blog in your email. If you use an RSS reader, you can subscribe to the RSS feed (but if you do, you already knew that!).

This will also give me a venue to run polls to gauge your interest in new features or tweaks to Ooga-Mooga, which will be great — the user survey many of you guys participated in a short while ago was a huge help.

I’ll also be posting the Collection of the Day here each day — I’ve been doing that as a bulletin on MySpace for a while now, and it’s been really popular. A bit on how that works: each night, Ooga-Mooga randomly selects a collection of a Standard or Trader Ooga-Mooga member, for spotlighting on the front page of Ooga-Mooga. Then, I take a gander at that collection, and select a mug that I think is really nice (if you have mugs tagged as “Favorite”, I try to pull one of those). Then, it gets posted here, and as a bulletin to the many friends of Ooga-Mooga on MySpace.

I’ve gone back and pulled all of the posts I’ve made on Tiki Central that were announcements about Ooga-Mooga, and posted them here — its pretty neat to read back and see how far Ooga-Mooga has come in the past couple of years.

I hope you find this new way of hearing about the latest doin’s at Ooga-Mooga easy, breezy, beautiful!

The image on the left is the “before” Ooga-Mooga badge, the image on the right is the “after”. Not a huge difference, but it’s the sort of thing that makes me batty when it’s not quite right. It’s a GIF instead of a JPEG now (I shoulda had it that way all along).

In order to get the new, shinier badge, go to Fun Stuff and re-copy and place the code. If you’re comfortable with html, it’s even easier — go whereever you placed your Ooga-Mooga badge, and change the “.jpg” to “.gif”. The old links to the .jpg versions will still work, if don’t feel like making the change.

I just rolled out the biggest change to Ooga-Mooga so far, but it’s largely behind the scenes.

As I mentioned earlier, requiring new Ooga-Mooga users to sign up for Tiki Central was sometimes confusing, so I’ve been working on detangling the two sites. I have now finished separating Ooga-Mooga from Tiki Central, and a Tiki Central account is no longer required to sign up on Ooga-Mooga.

This, of course, means bupkis to anyone here [on Tiki Central]. This change is more for people who don’t even know about Tiki Central yet. But I wanted to keep you in the loop, in case anything is wonky. I’ve made some very substantial changes to Ooga-Mooga (mostly under the hood) — please let me know if anything isn’t working right for you.

I’ve already told you about the new Messaging and Profile systems that replace the ones we were piggy-backing on Tiki Central. There are a couple more changes that are relatively minor (from where you’re sitting, anyway!). We still wanted to keep some of the neat functionality that came from your Ooga-Mooga and Tiki Central accounts being linked — notably, the link to your Ooga-Mooga collection from your posts on TC, and a link to your Tiki Central profile from your Ooga-Mooga profile. Now that a TC account isn’t required, you can initiate this linking yourself from the Account Settings page on Ooga-Mooga. Anyone who has signed up for Ooga-Mooga prior to today is already linked up, but any new Ooga-Mooga users will have the option of doing that in Account Settings.

Last night, I rolled out another new feature, and a bunch of folks have already found it and used it — you can add a Profile, including a snappy lil’ picture of yourself! Here’s an example, it shows what ScarabaTiki’s Collection page looks like now (I think his pic is really boss):

In addition to the picture, you can also add where you’re from, what your interests are, and a link to your personal website. It’s all in Account Settings. The profile pics also show up on all your comments, and on all your Messages.

Previously, Ooga-Mooga was piggy-backing on Tiki Central’s Personal Message system. Starting today, Ooga-Mooga has its own, separate message system. You can find the link to the Messages section on the right-hand “My Collection” side of Ooga-Mooga. Ooga-Mooga can send you an email alert when you have a new message (you can turn that off in Account Settings — the default setting is on).

Why the change? While Tiki Central & Ooga-Mooga’s symbiotic relationship has been all kinds of awesome, it’s super-confusing for new Ooga-Mooga users. More and more, these new Ooga-Mooga users are also totally new to Tiki Central. Figuring out one rather massive new site is hard enough, but asking new Ooga-Mooga-ers to figure out two massive sites at once is just too much. It’s a very happy mire to get caught in, to be sure, but it’s a mire nonetheless. So, I’m working to detangle Ooga-Mooga and Tiki Central a bit.

There’s a couple little perks with the new system: if you’re sending a message about a mug that’s for sale or for trade, then a thumbnail of the mug comes along with that new message, so you can see at a glance in your inbox which messages are about which mugs. Also, along with the email alerts of new messages, Ooga-Mooga can send you email alerts when one of the mugs on your Wish List has matched with a mug that has just come up for sale or for trade on Ooga-Mooga.

It’s fresh off the presses, so please feel free to pinch & poke it and tell me what you think. I’ll probably be adding a few small little tweaks over the next day or so.

Per Request: Latest Additions to Collections!
This was the most-requested new feature in the Ooga-Mooga survey, by far: the ability to see what the new additions are to someone’s collection. Now, you can see at a glance what new mugs and new pictures have been added to an Ooga-Mooga collection in the past week.

How do you see this fantastic new feature? Glad you asked! Check out…

Ooga-Mooga’s Revamped Home Page!
Ooga-Mooga’s home page used to show you a list of the five users who most recently added a new mug to their collection, and the five users who most recently added a new picture to their collection. Nice & all, but not nearly as useful as it could have been:

The two lists differed a bit, but only a bit, so it was kind of redundant

There’s enough traffic on Ooga-Mooga these days that only showing five users made it hard to keep up with the new additions

Worst of all — these links only took you to that person’s collection, it didn’t actually show you what was new; sifting through someone’s entire collection to try to spot the new mugs & pictures was practically impossible

Ahhhh… that’s much better!

The new Additions to Collections shows:

The entire list of users who have made new additions to their collections in the past week, instead of just the five most recent users

The link on their name still takes you to their entire collection

The link on “new mugs” takes you to a page showing you all their new mugs

The link on “new pictures” takes you to a page showing you all their new pictures

I also want to add these Latest Additions links on your Collection pages, but I’m going to think a bit longer about how to best incorporate it into the page — that page could also use a bit of an overhaul.

But that’s not all! While I was at it, I also improved the latest comments:

It now shows the ten most recent comments (instead of five), and instead of just giving you a link to the user who got the comment, it shows you who made the comment, and gives you a link right to the mug that got commented on. Keen!

Now that there’s a little bit more info there on the front page, there’s room to show more than just one picture from the Collection of the Day, so now it shows three pictures. Snazzy!

I’m so totally in love with this new setup, and I think you will be, too. If you’ve got any questions or comments, lemme have ‘em!

Faster Search
Actually, Search works pretty much exactly the same as it did before… but now, the default is to search only in the name and a.k.a.s of the mug templates, rather than the entire description. That makes the search much, much, much faster. If you want to do a more thorough search, you still can — just select “Name, AKAs and full description” when you do your search. Selecting specific things to narrow down your search can speed it up even more — for instance, if you know that the mug you’re looking for is green, select “Green” in the list of colors, or if you know it’s a Tiki Farm mug, select “Tiki Farm” in the list of Manufacturers.

Tips for Photographing Your Collection
I’ve created a page with tips & instructions for getting great pictures of your collection! You can see it here.

And now some thank yous…

Thank you to everyone who filled out the user survey! It was an amazing help — I got so much really useful feedback from it, and it’s really repositioned my ideas about what people want to see on Ooga-Mooga, which is awesome. Thank you, thank you, thank you. You’ll see some great changes on Ooga-Mooga as a direct result of your surveys.

And I must once again thank Tiki-Kate for her help in creating mug templates — Ooga-Mooga now has templates for nearly 2,500 mugs!